Please note: If you have a promotional code you'll be prompted to enter it prior to confirming your order.

Customer Sign In

Returning Customer

If you have an account, please sign in.

New Customers

If you subscribe to any of our print newsletters and have never activated your online account, please activate your account below for online access. By activating your account, you will create a login and password. You only need to activate your account once.

In Case You Missed It:

Viruses and Disease: Protecting yourself from the invisible enemy

Have you ever wondered whether you are truly protected from infectious diseases ranging from the common cold to more deadly threats like rabies or bird flu? When you travel, are you protected from the many infections abroad? Are you up-to-date on the new adult vaccines? This report describes the most up to date information on infectious disease and how to protect yourself from everything from stomach flu to HIV/AIDS.

Have you ever wondered whether you are truly protected from infectious diseases ranging from the common cold to more deadly threats like rabies or bird flu? When you travel, are you protected from the many infections abroad, from malaria to yellow fever? Are you up-to-date on the new adult vaccines and do you know what to do should a bioterrorist try to spread deadly smallpox or anthrax? This report describes the most up to date information on infectious disease and how to protect yourself from everything from stomach flu to HIV/AIDS.

Like most people, you probably got your vaccinations as a child and, since then, you’ve had tetanus boosters, maybe some flu shots, and some antibiotics when you needed them. When you catch a germ, you usually recover quickly. Most people in the United States and other developed countries have good reason to feel smug. They are well protected against infectious disease by vaccination, antibiotics, good hygiene, and general good health.

But for people whose immune systems are weakened by age or disease, it’s a different story. There are plenty of infectious microbes looking for a place to multiply and cause illness and sometimes death. In addition, diseases that just a few years ago seemed to be nearly wiped out often make worrisome comebacks despite widespread vaccination. Resistant strains of infections frequently appear. Still more alarming are the “new and emerging” diseases reported in the news, like SARS or bird flu, for which we have little or no immunity. And sexually transmitted diseases continue to pose a major health threat, with HIV at the top of the list, but also human papillomavirus, herpes simplex, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis continuing to spread.

What is the status of infectious disease in the 21st century? Wasn’t modern medicine supposed to have this under control by now with vaccines, antibiotics, and antiviral drugs? Are the news reports and alarming headlines about new and emerging diseases to be believed? Will resistant strains of disease overpower our ability to develop new drugs and vaccines? Is the landscape of infectious disease changing in the 21st century, and if so, how can medical science meet the new challenges?

There is no question that, to some degree, the tables have turned. But the tug of war between humans and microbes has always taken place. It is the nature of infectious microbes to damage and kill their hosts. As Cedric Mims described it in Mims’ Pathogenesis of Disease, “If none of the microorganisms associated with man did any damage and none was notably beneficial, they would be interesting but relatively unimportant objects. In fact, they have been responsible for the great pestilences of history, [and] have at times determined the course of history.”

Infectious disease in general and viruses in particular, have, indeed, shaped history. Take, for example, the settlement of North America by Europeans. The smallpox virus and other diseases carried by Europeans played at least as great a role in wiping out the indigenous American populations as did war and weapons. The conquest of Aztecs in Mexico by Hernando Cortes in 1520, for example, was accomplished less by the use of weapons than by the inadvertent introduction of the smallpox virus, endemic in Europe but completely new to the Aztec people, who had no immunity and fell ill and died at a staggering rate. Two years after Cortez arrived, 3.5 million native Americans were dead of smallpox.

The battle of human versus microbe is far from over and is never likely to be so, writes Mims: “Because of their rapid rate of evolution and the constantly changing circumstances of human life, they continue to present threats of future pestilences.”

The age-old story does, however, take some new twists in the 21st century. Several conditions of the modern world combine to influence the threat of infectious disease today.

No reviews have been left for this this report. Log in and leave a review of your own.